arthttp://member.iftf.org/taxonomy/term/1941/all
enReimagining the Future of Higher Education: From STEM to SEAD http://member.iftf.org/node/4287
http://member.iftf.org/node/4287#commentsartcollaborationcultureDesigneducationengineeringinnovationlearningsciencetechnologyThe Future Now<p>Design and art have long been viewed as distinct fields of inquiry from science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), but the contemporary perspective is that these modernist institutional distinctions are rapidly eroding now more than ever. For more than a decade, new residencies, institutions, collaborations, and projects have pushed the expectations and outcomes of working across both the sciences and the arts. Today, it's almost a given that science, design, engineering, and art are closely linked in product as well as practice. The benefits of these collaborations, while messy and uncertain, have taught us the value of craft in storytelling through data, new ways of working across disciplines, participatory experimentation, public witnessing of science, contestational demonstrations of technology, and the insightful taxonomies that can emerge from untethered interpretations of the world and our tools.&nbsp;</p><p><br />The <a href="http://sead.viz.tamu.edu/about/about.html" target="_blank">Network for Science, Engineering, Art and Design</a> (SEAD) is one of the few National Science Foundation-supported efforts to synthesize what we now know about the role of art and design into the practices of science and engineering as a formal institutional agenda.&nbsp;<br />Its vision is to become the leading advocate for collaboration among the sciences, engineering, arts and design, fostering innovation and learning that impact community sustainability and economic growth.&nbsp;</p><p><br />It aims to accomplish this goal by:&nbsp;</p><p>1. Facilitating experimentation with new methods, materials, and modes of creative inquiry.&nbsp;<br />2. Promoting life-long learning by supporting topics, pedagogies, and evaluation methods that integrate the sciences, engineering, arts and design.&nbsp;<br />3. Fostering strategic partnerships among individuals and organizations including government, industry, civic and academic institutions.<br />4. Valuing sustainability, community development and social entrepreneurship, in order to spur economic growth.</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The network is founded on the observations that innovation is happening at the intersection of the sciences, engineering, arts and design and that those intersections are some of the most transformative forces driving our economy, culture, and learning contexts.</p><p><br />New products, services, methodologies, and questions are now fundamentally hybrid, bringing together new actors and stakeholders in ways that were unimagined a decade ago.&nbsp;</p><p><br />And as a result, the way we play, the hardware use as tools, and how we use and disseminate information has enabled new forms of expression and interpretation. And collectively, as individuals and as a &nbsp;society, we are leveraging greater understandings of complex dynamics and communication forms to yield better coordination and cooperation across multiple scales.</p><p><br />In the last ten years, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics has been the core focus for teaching, learning, education, and policy-making to define and catalyze innovation and economic development in the United States. Now, as we recognize that these core skills and competencies live and breathe within the richness of culture and society, we are calibrating our expectations and our goals to match. Artists and designers are now entering a phase where their methodologies and interventions drive discovery is ways that transcend the simple communication of science. The practices and products of science and engineering, meanwhile, are rapidly discovering that beauty, mystery, and nonsense are as much a feature of experimentation and usability as functionality and form.</p><p><br />There is <a href="http://seadnetwork.wordpress.com/about/" target="_blank">an open call for visions that highlight these intersections, the obstacles they create, and the opportunities that emerge in the transition from STEM to SEAD</a>. While economic development and innovation are driving goals of this endeavor, there will be a broader set of impacts on how we share and and make decisions, the paths we use to determine what we call knowledge, and on the tools we will use to shape the reimagination of higher education and learning over the course of the next decade.</p>Thu, 23 Aug 2012 04:46:59 +0000Gabriel Harp4287 at http://member.iftf.orgReport from San Francisco: Art Hack Weekendhttp://member.iftf.org/node/4133
http://member.iftf.org/node/4133#commentsartcollaborative codinghackinghtml5javascriptkinectThe Future Nowwebgl<p class="p1">Last weekend I participated in&nbsp;<a href="http://www.gaffta.org/2012/02/13/art-hack-weekend-sf-a-webgl-html5-hackathon/">Art Hack Weekend</a>, where many of&nbsp;San Francisco’s leading web designers, developers, artists and hackers converged to exchange concepts, projects, and to create the next phase of cutting edge web apps using emerging web technologies from HTML5 to Kinect sensors, new javascript libraries, and WebGL. The weekend was organized and sponsored by the Grey Area Foundation for the Arts (<a href="http://www.gaffta.org/">GAFFTA</a>) and <a href="http://thecreatorsproject.com/">The Creators Project</a>, a strategic partnership between computing and culture -- aka Intel and Vice.</p>
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<p class="p1">The goal of the weekend was to unearth new paradigms for the web by exploring the interactions of code, meaning, and visual form to push the envelope of how we build and interact with 3D objects.&nbsp; The weekend hackathon asked what it meant to transcend the traditional 2D experience of the internet, and it did it in superb form, combining radical thinkers of the new web and the world that exists beyond the screen, with infinite regression into an web-based experience.&nbsp;</p>
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<p class="p1">The food was great, the organizing was great, and the people who showed up were great. <a href="http://www.gaffta.org/research/hacks/">Here's all of the hacks that resulted over the course of the weekend</a>. At the end of the day, what stands out is the ease with which a bunch of strangers got together, hashed out tenative ideas, and focused intensely over 48 hours (cue James Horner) to create well-formed experiences that were only a few steps from magical.</p>
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<p class="p1">For me it was a crash course in Blender, an open-source 3D rendering software. I also got a big leg up on collaborative coding using Github.&nbsp; The thing about collaboration is knowing when and how each other are making contributions, cumulatively learning from those contributions, and organizing a system of sharing with others. To understand better the social and cognitive processes underlying cumulative culture, <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6072/1114.abstract">this recent science article is a good find</a>.</p>
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<p class="p1">So here are a few of the most awesomest projects. Ours first, of course:</p>
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<p class="p1">A passerby stops to look at a visualization in a wndow on the street. The scene shows a screen of leaves gently falling to the ground. She notices that the leaves have started to settle on an invisible form, which as they accumulate, reveal the form to be her. As she moves, she notices that the leaves move with her, and the more she moves they shake off and continue to fall. A Kinect is used to capture the user and her motions. Libraries &amp; plugins used: HTML5 Boilerplate, jQuery, Three.js, Zigfu &amp; OpenNI, audiolib.js.</p>
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<p class="p1">Audio ShaderToy combines a WebGL shader editor with audio spectrum data. Drag an MP3 into your browser window and write some code! Instead of just watching a music visualization, you can manipulate and remix your own.</p>
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<p class="p1">Soundquake created a visual and acoustic representation of Bay Area earthquake data from 1973 – present day. They used 3D graphics and the web audio API to visualize geo-located data points and earthquake magnitudes from a fusion table comprising approximately 900 earthquakes that have happened in the Bay Area over the last 30 years. Every time an earthquake occurs over a chosen time range, a 3D rectangle will rise from the mapped epicenter and produce the sound of a banjo chord.&nbsp;</p>
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<p class="p1">Use LSD to collaboratively VJ live video on the web! Choose video clips, animated GIFs and images and blend them together using the mixer controls. A VJ can project the browser on a screen on stage at a concert or show, and then people in the audience can log in with their phones and choose their own clips to mix! Both the main screen and all user’s screens (phones) are updated in real-time for live collaborative VJing!</p><p>&nbsp;</p>Fri, 09 Mar 2012 05:49:51 +0000Gabriel Harp4133 at http://member.iftf.org